Review: The Map of the System of Human Knowledge

Is the beauty of the human brain the fact that we don’t know
everything? Or is it the potential for us to know it all? James Tadd
Adcox tackles those questions and many more that consider the processes
of the human mind in The Map of the System of Human Knowledge.
Within his pages, we get a chart of what is contained inside the brain,
and how all of these subjects–from memory to philosophy and
nature–combine to form a complete, functioning system. But the thing is,
the map still does not lead anywhere, nor should it. Rather, Adcox
provides the reader with a new way to view the life that surrounds us,
as well as the life that lives inside him as well.

We open in memory. Why do we forget? Why do we remember? Why do we
remember the horrible pain that comes from dropping something heavy on
our foot but not where we last placed our car keys? In
“History/Civil/Memoir,” we get a panorama of past, present, and future.
The protagonist’s father calls him on the phone and he wonders why.
Could he be drunk? He remembers his mother making treasure maps for he
and his brother when they were younger, turning their neighborhood into
an entirely new world. The future comes hurtling in when this man’s
father has died, when his mother is in an assisted-care facility, when
he is married. And then we are swept back into the past, back to when
this young, college-age man would drunkenly call his father but never
actually speak to him. These flashes and lapses in memory are striking
in their beauty and in their realism. It feels like actual memory, like
the reader, too, falls into the pattern of forgetting, remembering,
drunkenly forcing certain things to be or not to be. Adcox works these
maneuvers of the mind into striking vignettes that stick long after the
pages of the book fade away.

We pass from memory into reason. Philosopher David Hume returns from
the dead and brags about it; a religious man makes soup while pondering
the larger theological meaning of making soup in the world; a man
comforts his daughter, who believes a monster lives in the vacuum
cleaner; and a father fears his daughter’s imaginary friend may actually
be a predator living in their neighborhood. While these vignettes have
less circuitous beauty than the memory section, they are nevertheless
strikingly real. Especially in the imaginary friend story,
“Philosophy/Science Of Man/Logic/Art Of Thinking/Apprehension,” the fear
of one man becomes crystal clear. It is easy to see why he cannot
believe in pure imagination, but immediately moves into fear and
violence.

Finally, we arrive at imagination. In this final section, Adcox
combines the beauty of memory and the logic of reason into the magic of
the imagination. The author’s imagination proves to be something quite
extraordinary, giving the reader pause into how much reality goes into
something perhaps not quite real. In “Poetry/Profane/Theatrical/Opera,” a
soprano begins singing on street corners to spread opera into her
community. In “Poetry/Profane/Theatrical/Pastoral,” a Cyclops goes
blind. And in “Poetry/Profane/Painting,” a man’s wife only paints
miniature portraits. All of these surreal, tiny little stories are like
those miniature paintings: an artist’s view of reality transferred to a
canvas. In Adcox’s case, that canvas is the page, yes, but it is also
the minds of his characters and of his readers. Everything is
transformed into something new. Even though a map of sorts is created,
the mystery is deepened, rather than solved. The treasure remains
buried.

***

Joellyn Powers(Books Editor) will be entering the MFA program for fiction at American University this fall. Her work appears in Bluestem, Twelve Stories and Metazen, among others. You can follow her on Twitter @hipsternonsense, or on her blog about nothing at especiallyfreeing.tumblr.com.